Robert F. Reid-Pharr is Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality as well as African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has also worked at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, The Johns Hopkins University, College of William and Mary, American University of Beirut, University of Oxford, and University of Oregon. He completed his BA in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and PhD in American Studies at Yale University. Reid-Pharr’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation. He serves on the editorial advisory committee of Callaloo and the international advisory board of the Freie Universität’s research group “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”

A specialist in both African American culture and the field of race and sexuality studies, Reid-Pharr has published four books: Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU, 2016); Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (Oxford, 1999); Black, Gay, Man: Essays (NYU, 2001); and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual (NYU, 2007). His essays have been published in magazines and journals including American Literary History, Chronicle of Higher Education, Women and Performance, Transition, The African American Review, Feminist Formations, Art in America, and Radical America.